Countdown to World Fair Trade Day: Bora Aksu designs limited edition dresses for People Tree

Beauty goes beneath the surface with Bora Asku's designs for WFTD

To celebrate World Fair Trade Day (WFTD) on 10 May, Bora Aksu has designed a limited edition range of dresses for People Tree.

Aksu has encompassed this year’s WTFD day theme of Fair Trade and Ecology in the garments through the use of natural materials, dyes, traditional skills hand production to produce the dresses, in keeping with People Tree’s ideology. Aksu believes; ‘that ‘fairtrade’ is an overused description which shadows the importance of its actual meaning.’

‘Living in a world which is far away from being perfect I believe we all have a responsibility,’ he says. ‘As a fashion designer it’s very important for me to keep every step of creating a garment from fabric to the end product under the same umbrella of purity. Having a beautiful garment with such poor and ugly conditions behind its root does make the garment ugly despite what it looks like. That’s why it’s very important for me to be part of such an umbrella of people who have the same heart and understanding.’

The oversized, slouch-fit dresses are strictly limited edition, with three designs and only 142 in total, and each is hand signed in Bengali by the producer who tailored it. While the silhouette is the same for each dress each of the designs use varying fabrics and individual embellishments. The fabrics include Fairtrade cotton, which is handwoven at just four meters a day, a chambray dress which is dyed using sustainable tree seeds, cori and hortoki, and black silk dress, finished with traditional nokshi kantha hand embroidery. The dresses will be sold exclusively through asos.com